BludgerTrack: 52.0-48.0 to Labor

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With the return of Morgan and Essential Research, the weekly BludgerTrack poll aggregate is also back in business, albeit that it’s on a fairly shaky footing at present given the shallow pool of new data. However, since both polls show little change on the situation as they were recording it before the break, there’s nothing in national figures that should arouse any controversy. Both major parties and the Palmer United Party are down slightly on the primary vote, with the slack taken up by the Greens and others, and there is no change at all on two-party preferred. The seat projection nonetheless ticks a point in the Coalition’s favour owing to the vagaries of the latest state-level data. Full details, as always, on the sidebar (to those wondering why there are three data points after the break rather than two, the Morgan poll has been broken down into two results to account for it having been conducted over two weekends).

The monthly personal ratings from Essential Research also allow for an update to the leadership ratings, but this should be treated with even greater caution given that there’s only one result available from the past month. So while it may be that the air is indeed going out of Bill Shorten’s honeymoon, you would want to see more than one data point from Essential Research before jumping to such a conclusion, which is essentially all the model is reacting to at present. This points to a broader difficulty with the BludgerTrack leadership rating methodology which I aim to address in due course, namely the lack of any adjustment for each pollsters’ idiosyncrasies. There will thus be a tendency for the numbers to move around based purely on which particular pollster happens to have reported most recently. When enough data is available, I will start tracking each pollsters’ variation from the aggregated trend and applying bias adjustments accordingly.

When the Prime minister of the fay enters the commentary box during one of our greatest cricket triumphs, and can’t stop talking about himself, he doesn’t deserve a bounce. It showed how desperate he is, and how self centred.

BTW William, I hope you are finishing your PhD. I think there is a career in psephology for you. The number of people who understand the stats and electoral process, and can comment on them intelligently and impartially, is not so high.

Thanks. I’m torn between tears and laughter at the moment. A diary of all the things that go awry in this household might be amusing, but I don’t have the energy.

And here’s an excellent crit of Pyne’s rubbish.
[Since federal Education Minister Christopher Pyne’s launch last week of a two-man curriculum review panel, of conservative educationist Kevin Donnelly and conservatively inclined business academic Kenneth Wiltshire, levels of incredulity, derision and cynicism among educators and political commentators (outside News Corp media) have gone off the Richter scale.

Pyne might as well have announced he was rearranging the communal henhouse by shoving two foxes through its front door. The curriculum history wars, part of the bigger culture wars that have been blighting the Australian cultural and political landscape for more than a decade, were on again.

The history wars are an invention of the political right which sees hidden ”cultural-leftist” influence at every turn in the government school curriculum, a chimera supported in particular by News Corp’s broadsheet The Australian.]

Thanks and agreed. We keep the cats inside and they have plenty of water. I work in an air conditioned building.

The 6am temperature was the overnight minimum in Adelaide. It did not get below 30 C. The temperature was still 35 C at 2am. This will kill quite a few frail people. The entire week has been unrelenting.

What I can’t understand is why the AS did not scuttle the boat, forcing the navy to rescue them.

This scenario has been discussed on PB before as the reason that turning back the boats won’t work – yet it appears to be working fine, at least so far as getting the boats headed back to Indonesia is concerned.

You are dead right. The visual horizon for a ship at sea is under 20 nautical miles, radar maybe 30. The area we patrol is over 1000 nautical miles. We would need 40 ships. We have less than two dozen ships, and they have to be rotated for servicing. At night there is no chance we could stop them all.

my cat seems to be doing a ‘places you never guessed were cool’ tour of the house.

Yesterday, it was behind the garbage bin in the kitchen. The day before, it was the saucepan cupboard under the sink.

On a more serious note, having put a sprinkler hose in one chicken enclosure and regularly thrown buckets of water in to cool down the ground in the other, I forgot all about providing water for the free – roaming birds — fortunately they’re good at hinting.

Our forecast is for ‘high 40s’ and given we are usually a coupla degrees above that its possible we’ll hit 50.
Hope not.
We have been up since before sunrise walking the dogs who otherwise get bored with being housebound.
Filled the bird baths with water, they are showing their appreciation, and now we’re inside a closed up house with the temperature under the front verandah already at 33.
Bad day ahead.

It is good to see the sense shon by the PB folk on heatwave precautions. Hopefully this is a sample of typical behaviour making deaths of people and animals as minimal as possible.

I have an additional piece of advice for those without air conditioning on this exceptional day. A good day to go to the cinema and watch a couple of movies in air conditioned comfort if you are close enough to do so and animals ok to be left alone. Alternatively visit a friend who has air conditioning.

Sydney’s missing out on all this heat so far and looks likely to escape this heat wave. For the last few days it’s been brilliant blue skies and cicadas, maxing out in the high 20’s with high humidity near the coast, 30 to 33 away from the Harbour and the beaches but getting into the high 30’s in the outer Western suburbs where all those key voters who worry about ‘boats’ live.